A Stained-Glass Artist Enjoys a Renaissance

The stained-glass artist Robert Pinart in 2014. His works, appearing in places as prominent as the Washington National Cathedral, are being documented by two Brooklyn historians.CreditMichael Padwee

By Eve M. Kahn

Sept. 3, 2015

Last month the stained-glass artist Robert Pinart revisited two windows he designed that had been installed in the 1980s at the New City Jewish Center in Rockland County, N.Y.

“I get the same joy looking at it again as when I was working on it,” he said, as sun poured through his depictions of a menorah and a burning bush. Mr. Pinart, 88, explained his choices of painted shadows, yellow highlights and opalescent swoops. A milky bubble, he said, represents “the pleasure of blowing glass.”

Mr. Pinart, who lives in Nyack, N.Y., has been enjoying something of a renaissance this summer. Susan Ingham Padwee and her husband, Michael Padwee, historians in Brooklyn who met Mr. Pinart a year ago, are tracking down his works in the United States and overseas, and documenting his repairs to windows designed by more famous artists, like Marc Chagall. The Padwees are transcribing hours of interviews with Mr. Pinart; planning related exhibitions and publications; and posting findings on their blog, Tiles in New York.

Mr. Pinart’s abstract and figurative windows, fabricated by companies including Wilmark Studios and Cummings Stained Glass Studios, have appeared in homes, institutions, commercial spaces and houses of worship as prominent as the National Cathedral in Washington. He worked with sheet glass and embedded glass slabs in concrete and other substrates, a technique called dalle de verre.

Over lunch with the Padwees last month, Mr. Pinart reminisced about his childhood in wartime Paris, his postwar jobs repairing church windows and his move in the 1950s to the United States to find work. He was briefly married to the American ceramist Jean Nison, who introduced him to clients. He often collaborated with the architect Percival Goodman, a specialist in synagogues. “He was very trusting and very open,” Mr. Pinart said.

Mr. Pinart may have produced as many as 800 windows; the Padwees are still counting. “Altogether, the harvest was pretty good,” Mr. Pinart said.

His works occasionally come on the market; panes depicting religious figures and dirigibles have sold for a few hundred dollars each. A handful of his windows in shuttered buildings, including dalle de verre panels at the Bronx Zoo, are in limbo. The Padwees have not yet discovered the fate of his panes that were removed from a demolished chapel at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Mr. Pinart was philosophical about the lost airport sanctuary.

“One has to be practical, and now it is a parking lot,” he said.

Windows by his contemporaries, including Chagall, are on view through Sept. 21 at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris. On Sept. 26, a conference at the First Presbyterian Church in Stamford, Conn., often called the Fish Church, will focus on the building’s dalle de verre skin, imported from France in the 1950s.